<p>
Bookie is a personal attempt to keep the bookmarks that I have at home
synced with the bookmarks I have at work, and also to have shared bookmarks.
</p>
<p>
It is an outgrowth of the bluesky <a href="http://www.mozilla.org/blue-sky/ui/199805/bookmarks.html">good
bookmarking</a> and <a href="http://www.mozilla.org/blue-sky/misc/199805/collaborative-bookmark-index.html">collaborative
bookmark indexing</a>.
</p>
<p>
In addition, there are sites which attack this
problem from another angles:
<a href="http://renaghan.com/bookmarker/">Bookmarker</a> and
<a href="http://www.webwizards.net/useful/wbbm.htm">Web-Based Bookmark Managers</a>. The most promising competitor to Bookie is probably
<a href="http://www.collaboration-world.com/cgi-bin/collaboration-world/project/index.cgi?pid=1">Xbelette</a>,
which has a very nice user interface although I haven't tried it myself.
You may also wish to try
<a href="http://olbookmarks.sourceforge.net/">olbookmarks</a>, which is a Mozilla sidebar thingy.
</p>
<p>
Quite frankly, bookmark management sucks. Every person I know has a
collection of bookmarks which have grown over months if not years. Not only
the bookmarks themselves but the structure of the bookmark directory is
critical. Yahoo's origin and real, underlying purpose is as a huge
collection of well organized bookmarks. Yet while it is easy to send a URL
over the web, sending branches or entire trees is impossible. It is
impossible to share the same bookmarks folder with several people, so that
all information can be synced over a department. And it's really hard to
keep bookmarks synced between several locations.
</p>
<p>
The roaming access feature in Netscape goes in the right direction of
solving these problems, but RDF is the perfect answer to these problems.
Whenever a browser wants to see bookmarks, it can make a request to a
central bookmark server, and receive streamed RDF. Likewise, whenever a
bookmark or branch is submitted, RDF can be sent to the server and synced
with all the other clients.
</p>
<p>
Ergo, Bookie. It's a crude work in progress, but it teaches me a lot about what
I should be doing, and lets me read and understand code written by people way
smarter than me.
</p>